Remembering Jimmy Carter

There are worlds within worlds. Galaxies fill the cosmos. Stars fill the galaxies and planets spin around the stars. The earth, what we call our world, is just one of them, and on its surface, eight billion people construct eight billion worlds. The numbers are astounding, but even the humblest of these worlds is rich beyond imagining, and when death takes someone from our world, we lose the riches of theirs. Occasionally someone comes along who changes our world for the better in so many ways that the riches of their life remain as an example for all to witness and follow. Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, was such a person.

The celebration of President Carter’s life during the week of his funeral in January reminded us not only of his many accomplishments but also, and more importantly, of his fundamental decency.

How does a boy from rural Georgia, who spent shoeless summers working and playing on his family’s farm, grow up to be President of the United States, a Nobel Prize winner, devoted husband and family patriarch, Sunday school teacher, and author of 30 books?

These are the questions psychologists are well-equipped to answer, but we know before we start that we will end up with some combination of nature and nurture. We need the help of historians and biographers to discover how much of each, at what periods of President Carter’s life, under what circumstances and at whose hands these ingredients were delivered. In this work, President Carter gives us a head start with his voluminous writing and the news coverage of his presidency and his activities in the years that followed.

On a world stage where talk of religious faith is viewed with suspicion, Carter held fast to the beliefs of his Southern Baptist upbringing and modeled his life on the law of love for God and his fellow man. After a dispiriting defeat in his first run for governor of Georgia, he did mission work in Pennsylvania and Springfield, Massachusetts. His partner in Springfield was a Cuban American named Elroy Cruz who was the pastor of a small church in Brooklyn, New York.

In his book, “Our Endangered Values,” Carter shared what he considered the greatest lesson he learned from this experience. When Carter asked Reverend Cruz the secret of his ability to connect with the people they met on their mission, Cruz replied, “You only need two loves in your life: for God, and for the person in front of you at any particular time.” This advice seemed to be a summation of all that Mr. Carter had learned and tried to practice in his early years and a beacon to guide him in the work he would do in the future.

In his public life, President Carter was comfortable discussing his faith, but at the same time, made it clear through his words and actions that his religious beliefs would never interfere with his duty to the Constitution. Carter believed in the separation of church and state, that our country should never establish a state religion or give preferential treatment to people of a particular faith. While he described himself as an evangelical Christian, he was not a fundamentalist, and in his writings, he warned of the dangers of the rising tide of fundamentalism in religion and politics.

Mr. Carter saw fundamentalism not as a benign clinging to the basic truths of religion or civil governance but as an ideology and practice of dividing the world between true believers and anyone who disagreed with them. The true believers were right and good, and those who disagreed were labeled wrong and quite possibly evil.

With his signal accomplishments at home and abroad, most notably the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, being eclipsed by runaway inflation, the oil embargo, and the Iranian hostage crisis, President Carter did not win a second term in office.

He is widely considered to have accomplished more in the years following his presidency than he did while in the White House. President Carter is remembered for the good he did wherever he had the resources and the opportunity to make a difference, including his work in the areas of human rights, election monitoring in fragile democracies, the eradication of disease in developing countries, building homes for the homeless, and establishing the Carter Center to carry on his mission.

There are worlds within worlds, and the world we lost with the death of President Jimmy Carter is irreplaceable. Even as we mourn his loss, we have reason to be grateful for the good he did and the example he gave. It is just this simple truth that one honest person guided by the law of love can leave an indelible imprint on the world we share and inspire us to follow in whatever way we can.